Working Paper No. 13-31:
The Choice to Protect: Rethinking Responsibility for Humanitarian Intervention

Author(s):

Abstract:

Against
the background of President Barack Obama’s invocation of the responsibility to
protect (R2P) in Libya and the failure of the international community to assume
responsibility for humanitarian crimes in countries such as Syria, this Article
reexamines the R2P doctrine from the perspective of states called to intervene.
The approach here is novel and fills a gap in the existing literature about
R2P, which has emphasized the harm to victims and abstract principles of
international responsibility. This Article demonstrates that the responsibility
of one state to the people of another state posits a new international duty and
that justifications offered for this duty have proven insufficient. Moreover,
R2P has not changed the reality that any responsibility will ultimately be
defined by states contemplating intervention, in part because there are no
agreed standards for responsibility and the doctrine has various triggering
conditions that must be assessed by states. Whatever the moral obligation of
states, they will necessarily assess responsibility from their own perspective.
In addition, domestic bureaucratic competition and conflict demonstrate how the
choice about whether to intervene includes many factors unrelated to humanitarian
concerns. All of this suggests that a commitment to human security through
intervention requires focusing more closely on the states called to intervene.